The relationship between personality types and leisure time activities amongst Casino employees’ workplace expectations

Abstract

Orientation: Associations between a person’s character strengths, happiness and well-being can be explained with the overlap that they have with personality. Casino employees’ working hours were and are increasing, which means that their leisure time is decreasing concomitantly, with only 20 hours per week being used in pursuit of leisure activities.

Research purpose: The primary purpose of this research was to investigate 1502 casino employees’ personality types and the relationship it has on their leisure life and overall happiness.

Motivation for the study: The importance of leisure participation and time to take part in leisure activities, and the effect it has on casino employees’ happiness in the workplace, warrants further investigation. If human resources managers and general management want happier casino employees in the workplace, they should focus on their personality types and make more leisure activities available to them; which will result in a happier workforce.

Research design, approach and method: The target population consisted of 3032 casino employees, who received the questionnaires and were given the opportunity to complete the questionnaires anonymously. An availability sampling technique was used, based on the number of casino employees who were willing and available to complete the questionnaires.

Main findings and practical/managerial implications: In terms of the structural equation modelling, it was found that the positive personalities such as extraversion and openness to experience correlated well with leisure life and happiness. In this study, the standardised regression weights showed that if an individual has a negative personality, he or she will not necessarily be unhappy. A positive relationship was found between positive personality traits such as cooperativeness and agreeableness and leisure life and happiness. Considering mediation effects, leisure preference was the greatest partial mediator between happiness and personalities.

Contribution: Human resource managers of casino establishments can use these results to determine the type of personality of casino employees that will experience a good leisure life and happiness in relation to the workplace, contributing to positive psychology and human resource literature.

Keywords: Casino employees; employee benefits; feelings toward the company; happiness; human resource management